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Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

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Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

#11

Post by bitwize »

chj wrote: post #3

> I know several world class programmers, and interestingly, the commonality among them is that they all seem to use Vim as their code editor. Many people I know who think of themselves as world class programmers use Emacs. Curious who and who?

I've known many world-class programmers who use Emacs, among them Kalman Reti and Steve Summit.

Most of the diehard Vim users I encountered were kind of in the DUVASWUV camp (DHH Uses Vim And So We Use Vim), i.e., they came to it as part of the whole Rails memeplex. That said, vi(m) and Emacs used to share the throne as the canonical Unix wizard editors because they were nearly ubiquitously available, consistent in UI across the decades, and they rewarded proficiency (each in their own way). It was a reliable assumption that a halfway decent programmer in the open-source tradition would be quite familiar with one or the other, if not both.

Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

#12

Post by wk_end »

The question this leaves unanswered is: why not VS Code?

I don't know if MS built VS Code deliberately to compete with Atom, and I don't know if they bought GH to kill Atom. But once they had Atom in their hands, it only made sense to kill off Atom - they're extremely similar.

They're both: (1) free Electron-based text editors that (2) are highly extendable in JS, are (3) powerful enough to use as IDEs, but (4) more lightweight than Visual Studio or the JetBrains stuff, and (5) use now-standard UI conventions unlike Vim or Emacs.

And using VS Code opens up the ecosystem of the most popular code editor in the world. There's more plugins, more eyes to catch bugs, and one of the richest companies in tech funding improvements on it. With nothing distinguishing it, Pulsar faces an enormous uphill battle if it wants to compete with that.

Maybe I'm missing something and Atom/Pulsar have some killer features that VS Code doesn't and won't ever have. Or maybe you just prefer using Pulsar, which...fair enough.

Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

#13

Post by idle_zealot »

bwhaley wrote: post #8
idle_zealot wrote: post #4

The author asserts that Emacs uses modes (it doesn't by default), does not have a GUI (it does), and cannot display images (it can). Not that this detracts from the point they should have made, which is that it has a steeper learning curve than Pulsar.

Also, as a vim user, modes are completely fine and I do not believe that modes slow me down. I’m not sure why the author is so insistent on this point.

Intuitively having to press more keys in order to accomplish an action sounds like it would be slower than a single key combo. Of course this fails to account for the fact that pressing something like Option+Fn+Backspace to forward-delete a word is far more awkward than f-d and therefore takes longer.

Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

#14

Post by jerbear4328 »

I used to use and love Atom, but it was pretty slow, to be honest. I switched to VSCode after it was unsupported by Microsoft for a while, and I've been happy with the switch. I wasn't aware of this fork at the time. Curious if improvements have been made since then, but I'm very happy with VSCode at the moment.

Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

#15

Post by resonious »

> VS Code is actually the reason why Atom eventually died. In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub, the world’s largest open source hosting platform, to get premier mind share of developers, and as part of that plan, Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft.

I was nodding my head for the first half of this but then it went full conspiracy. Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"? It's also open source. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm pretty sure VSCode killed Atom by being way faster and easier to develop plugins for.

Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

#17

Post by pech0rin »

I don’t get the point of talking about how much you love something by shitting on what other people use. Ha ha emacs users are idiots. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive but whats the point of saying this? Can’t you just talk about whats great about your thing and not take pot shots at other tech.

Re: Pulsar, the best code editor since Atom

#19

Post by esclerofilo »

resonious wrote: post #15

> VS Code is actually the reason why Atom eventually died. In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub, the world’s largest open source hosting platform, to get premier mind share of developers, and as part of that plan, Microsoft also wanted as many developers as possible to do all their coding using an editor controlled by Microsoft. I was nodding my head for the first half of this but then it went full conspiracy. Is VSCod…

> Is VSCode really all that "controlled by Microsoft"?

Yep. VSCode "core" is open source, but many of the official extensions aren't (Python, C#, Live Share, Dev Containers IIRC). Besides, accessing the extension marketplace from a non-official vscode build is against their terms of service, meaning forks like vscodium don't have easy access to most extensions.

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